Dragonia
(Creator Note: Due to the fact that Dragonia is a Unified Planet-State and that the people are all a unified people, unlike Earth per sé, where you have Americans, Germans, French, etc. The planet and the people/history share a common page. Any Unified Planet-State will be created in this way.) The Divine Empire of Dragonia, Divine Dragonian Empire, or simply Dragonia is a Unified Planet-State. It is broken up into 4 provinces (Grand Dragonia, Xan Shire, Ainogard, Carasset) with a majority of the surface covered by liquid water. The planet is abundant in mineral wealth including Iron, Uranium and other precious metals. On a geological scale, the planet of Dragonia is approximately 8 times the size of the Planet Earth with a surface area of over 32 billion kilometers. The population is just shy of 23 billion inhabitants. The Planet of Dragonia is the 4th planet in the Aegian Star System with an atmosphere that is composed of very slightly higher concentrations of common greenhouse gasses that allow for the planet to maintain a steady temperature of 70-90° Fahrenheit or 21-23° Centigrade. The atmospheric composition allows for the sustainance of life, even being further from the star than a typical inhabited planet. The gravity on Dragonia is approximately 1.1G, making it 10% heavier all-around than on Earth. Due to this slightly higher gravity, Dragonian citizens tend to be physically superior to most people who are from inhabited planets as their bodies had over a millenium to adapt to the gravity. The weather patterns on Dragonia are typical of what you would find on a planet with multiple different temperaments including arid deserts, permanently frozen poles, tropical equatorial areas and weather belts. Dragonia is known for having particularly heavy rains and immense thunderstorms in certain mountainous regions around the planet called the "Thunder Belt". The Axial Tilt of Dragonia is approximately 26.4°. A Dragonian year, or Cycle as it is referred to, is measured out at 368.2 Galactic Standard Days. Due to it being almost 3 days longer than a typical Earth year, every 10 years (deci-cycle) an extra month is added to the Dragonian Calendar to compensate. A Dragonian day lasts approximately 23 hours, 58 minutes and six seconds. Early Dragonia and the Dragon War The Dragonian people originally started out as a group of loose colonies spread sparsely around the planets various landmasses. The original settlers of Dragonia were populations of people from different locations in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy who ventured further inward to escape a great catastrophie. Space Warfare broke out amongst the fleeing humans because no one was sure who they could trust or who was the enemy. After several bloody skirmishes and loss of life numbering the tens of millions, a courageous leader rose forth and rallied all of the people under one banner. This man, Gabriel Helmsman, led the individuals into the deep recesses of the Scutum-Crux arm and settled upon the planet known at the time as SC-88453. On this planet, the inhabitants quickly discovered that although there wasn't human life present on the planet, there was indeed life on the planet. The dominant species on the planet were Dragons. Naturally, the humans and the Dragons were the bitter opposites of one another. The Dragons fought the humans because they were smaller, weaker, and as far as they were concerned, lower on the food chain. The Humans fought the Dragons for survival and in some cases access to resources the Dragons guarded for any number of reasons. The fighting was bloody. Unlike typical animals, Dragons possessed extremely high levels of intelligence. They had higher cognitive flexibility, they could speak, learn language, plan, hypothesize, envision and many other traits that were up until that point deemed to be exclusive to humans. This meant that the Dragons would have to be fought in terms of not humans hunting animals, but humans fighting against other humans. Gabriel Helmsman realized that the Dragons have been on SC-88453 for many millenia and that they were not only perfectly suited for the climate and planet, they knew every inch of the planet including weather cycles, natural disasters and they possessed inherently superior senses to humans in both sight and smell. The Dragons also possessed height, physical power, thick carapaces and could fly. This meant they, by default, had all the advantages over the humans in a warfare scenario and that a protracted war with the Dragons would lead to their utter demise. With nowhere else to go and their ships destroyed by the Dragons, Gabriel Helmsman took to something he gambled with once before, diplomacy. Allowing himself to be taken by the Dragons under the banner of diplomatic peace, he met with the Dragon Council of Elders, led by a Dragon known as Farseer Galbrath. Galbrath questioned Gabriel as to why his people were invading their homeworld. Gabriel, taken by surprise as to how the Dragon could communicate in his language, answered that they were fleeing a "Great Evil" and that they found this to be one of the few inhabitable planets in range of their ships after they dropped out of FTL. Galbrath explained that the human language was primitive and that their higher cognitive abilities allowed them to easily pick up the patterns and words used, Galbrath also revealed that these humans were not the first to pass by their homeworld, and that the last group which came by several millenium prior engaged the Dragons without warning. Gabriel then questioned Galbrath as to the outcome of the war and ultimately his age. Galbrath answered that it was a pyrrhic victory for the Dragons, as the humans brought weapons of unspeakable evil, causing the deaths of tens of millions of Dragons, but in exchange the Dragons "took out the throat of the aggressors", which he clarified as killing hundreds of millions if not close to a billion humans in the conflict. As the humans retreated, the Dragons became ultra-aggressive toward any outsider interference and Gabriel's being human did not help the situation. Galbrath also allowed Gabriel to know his age, which was just shy of 4000 Earth years old. Gabriel explained to the Farseer that his people meant no harm and that they were only acting in self-defense and would lay down arms against the Dragons if only the Dragons would no longer attack them. He also explained that they brought with them no weapons of unspeakable evil and they had no intention of subjugating the native species of this planet. That they only wanted a place for their people to grow and be safe. Galbrath could sense in Gabriel that he was telling the truth, he also could sense through telepathy that Gabriel has succeeded in keeping his people from slaughtering each other once before, so he could tell that his intentions were true. At this moment, Galbrath revealed to Gabriel that he would allow the humans to stay on his planet under the condition that they do not take up arms against the Dragons ever again. Gabriel agreed to those terms and the elder Farseer used his mental power to call off all of the Dragons from attack. Gabriel informed that he possessed no such power and it would take time for him to alert the humans that the war had ended, so that he should expect other groups of humans to be looking out for hostile targets. Galbrath informed him that the Dragons had disabled all of the humans means to wage aerial warfare in the time that Gabriel was meeting with him, as the Dragons were going on the final offensive. Gabriel had saved his people from a certain death. Before parting ways, Gabriel asked the elder Farseer what the name of their homeworld was. Galbrath informed him that his people just referred to the planet as "Dragonia". Gabriel had then become the Dragonian people's first leader. Scientific Explosion In the proceeding years, the newly christened Dragonian people flourished. Beginning with a population of 25 million before the start of the war and ending with a population of 18.5 million, they began to regain their numbers. 30 years after the war, the Dragonians made genetic leaps using DNA provided from the Dragons themselves at the request of Gabriel. The most curious aspect and the goal of this research was to find out how the Dragons can live 4000 years and to see if it can be isolated and replicated in other species. After years of concentrated work, the gene was isolated and decoded. Bio-Engineers figured out that the gene itself causes a rapid change in creatures it was spliced into and a rapid reconstitution of other critical DNA components which would allow for the replacement of dead or lost cells due to age. It also reversed the signs of aging in proportion to the amount of time life was extended. Bio-Engineers estimated that given how when spliced into a common fly, which has a typical lifespan of 24 hours lived for over 100 days, that humans could in theory live up to 1000 years, maybe even more if their medical technology can keep up with their genetics. Gabriel, now in his 80s volunteered to be the first test subject. After the genetic splice, he entered a deep sleep, which lasted several days. When he awoke, the change was beyond anything anyone could've imagined. Gabriel looked like he was in his twenties. His frailty and feebleness were gone. It was as if he had never aged. Over the next several decades, Gabriel pressed on as the spokesperson for Dragonian Genetic Engineering and began a regimented augmentation of his own people. The goal was to see if the gene would be passed on through childbirth which would them make the Dragonians naturally pre-disposed to living a thousand years without any scientific intervention, the goal was realized. As the next generation of Dragonian children had the genetic markers for extended age. The First Great War The First Great War began in September 1480 of the Galactic Standard calendar. The First Great War was also marked as being the first conflict where the Dragonian people fought a war against a foreign and superior belligerent. The War was considered a galactic war, due to there being battles that occured in space. The war began when the Empire of Lushanea's 3rd Subjugation Fleet began an unprovoked orbital bombardment of the surface of Greater Dragonia in the middle of the night. Hoping to capture the planet from the inhabitants and enslave as many of them as possible, the 3rd Fleet refrained from using weapons of mass destruction to keep as much of the infrastructure as possible intact for the coming occupation. The First Great War occured over the course of 23 years with intense fighting all throughout the conflict with little to no respite for either side. It was characterized by an enormous loss of life, totalling close to 15,000,000 dead between the two sides. This was the second time the Lushanean Empire attempted to subjugate the planet of Dragonia. Battle of Greater Dragonia The Battle of Greater Dragonia occured from October 1480 to March of 1492. The first massive concentration of Lushanean ground troops was situated mainly on Greater Dragonia with hopes to cut off the Dragonian leadership quickly and to break the will of the people by capturing not only their capital city of Hirudegarn, but by capturing their main continent and turning their industrial base against them. The battle began with steady and occasional orbital bombardments of multiple strategic communication and military assets across the continent, with the aim of cutting off the military from their senior leadership and thus turning the Dragonian military into more of a punching bag than anything else. The orbital bombardments proceeded unhindered until the Dragonians were able to assemble and launch a Starbreaker AM56 Anti-Orbit Missile armed with 45 tons of ultra-high Explosive. The missile, although hastily assembled managed to not only break orbit, but impact the Orbital Assault Ship, the Nadralanda, just forward of her fusion reactors. The missile cracked the ship in half and destabilized the fusion reactors onboard the ship, causing an enormous secondary explosion to quickly finish off the ship. WIthout orbital support, the Lushanean command sent in 3.5 million ground troops to begin the actual physical invasion of the continent. Gabriel Helmsman assembled and met Moshir Nordenar Selbalada on the field of battle with 6.5 million Dragonian regular troops with 500000 conscripts, totalling 7 million troops. Battle For Hirudegarn I The first Battle for Hirudegarn began January of 1482 and lasted until April of 1483.